Fatal Frame III: The Tormented [PS2]

Caveat Emptor: If a similar warning were to come from most survival horror games, it would sound like eye-rolling, press-release hokum -- but it doesn't, and it isn't. Fatal Frame III: The Tormented is not for the overly sensitive. Insofar as any video game today conveys the sense of supernatural forces right there in the darkened room with the player, The Tormented does it.

Following in the "shudder"-bug footsteps of the series, The Tormented introduces a new player-character photographer named Rei Kurosawa (talk about your unnecessary social pressure!). By the Fatal Frame standard, she's an unusual beauty, tall and slinky -- but she's in unusual misery, hagridden by guilt over the death of her beloved fiance Yuu, dead in a recent car crash (with Rei behind the wheel at the time).

Harsh? Yes, but the horror and guilt only get worse when Rei subsequently sees her late fiance's image surface in a recent photo taken at a supposedly-haunted location. What follows is a gradual descent into an ever-disintegrating supernatural borderland between Rei's too-quiet waking life and the "House of Sleep," an old-Japan dream realm filled with dark hallways, crumbling shoji screens... and likewise tormented spirits. If you've played the previous Fatal Frame games, be prepared to see some familiar faces and to revisit some -- sorry, it's necessary -- old haunts.

Mechanically, almost nothing has fundamentally changed from the previous Fatal Frame installment. Once again, the soul-dispatching Camera Obscura is the player's only real weapon against the ghosts -- it's a device that periodically turns the subtly creepy adventure into a terrifying, right-in-your-face first-person shooter.

It's never been explained precisely how or why it works, but the closer and better-framed a shot you take with the Camera, the more damage you deal to a ghostly attacker. Of course, letting the spirits get too close is a dangerous proposition, sometimes a fatal one.

Players can improve the camera with upgrades such as a series of wider-area lenses, stronger "ammunition" (film types), and modular features with special effects (such as that of slowing down supernatural foes). Over time, it's possible to shape the combat to suit your own play style, and keep the otherwordly enemies a bit further at bay. The Camera can also be used to photograph people, places, and things in the game world, with the resulting pictures often yielding clues to puzzles and views of distant places.

The good news is that the control has been honed to the sharpest edge the series has yet seen. The bad news is, so have the supernatural forces arrayed against you. Even with the improvements to your control (including a "quick turnaround"), Fatal Frame 3 can get really hairy. Long before the halfway point, you'll be taking on multiple ghostly foes that waver and teleport around the room, coming at you from all sides.

This time around, players control multiple characters over the course of the game; in addition to Rei, The Tormented features the return of Miku Hinasaka (from the first Fatal Frame) as well as Kei Amakura (Rei's journalist friend and, it turns out, a relative of the luckless Amakura twins from Fatal Frame II), each with their unique strengths and weaknesses.